Obama signs sequester bill

Austerity has hit the United States as President Barack Obama signed into law a directive ushering in significant cuts to federal agencies' budgets and triggering the sequester that has been debated in Washington during the last several weeks.

In the White House on Friday, President Obama inked his name to
the order, and with it signed off on automatic budget cuts that the
country's political class say will save the United States over $1
trillion over the course of the next decade. In doing so, though,
$85 billion will be erased from this year’s budget and a number of
government departments will see their funding slashed
immediately.

Through the sequester deal, roughly half of all cuts will be
imposed on the Pentagon, drastically reducing funding for America’s
defense. While uniformed personnel are protected from the
directive, civilian employees and contractors across the world will
be faced with layoffs and furloughs. The Department of Defense has
already published a plan explaining who exactly will be impacted,
and at its worst it could mean roughly $500 billion dollars cut
from the Pentagon during the next decade.

The second half of all cuts triggered by the sequester will be
implemented on domestic non-military spending. While crucially
important programs like Social Security are exempt from the
changes, practically all federal departments and agencies will face
some degree of slashed funding. The Departments of Education,
Agriculture and dozens of other agencies will see serious changes
during the coming days, weeks, months and years. Many have already
announced that the order will bring dire consequences. The
Department of Transportation, for example, has warned that budget
cuts might affect its ability to control air traffic; cuts to the
Department of Homeland Security will mean longer lines at
international borders and airports due to personnel layoffs.
Rollbacks on education are expected to cause as many as 40,000 jobs
to disappear nationwide, and more than half of a million women and
children across the US will no longer have access to food aid due
to reductions in the Women, Infants and Children program.

With the sequester deal essentially effecting each sector and
every US resident alike, lawmakers in Washington have hoped to find
another solution for solving the country’s ever-increasing economic
woes. During an address from the White House Friday morning,
though, Obama blamed Congress for not being able to prevent the
cuts.

“What I can’t do is force Congress to do the right
thing,” said the president. “The American people may have
the capacity to do that, but in the absence of a decision on the
part of the speaker of the House and others . . . we are going to
have these cuts in place.”

The Obama administration has come under fire as of late for
blaming the sequester deal on House Republicans. “The sequester
is not something that I've proposed. It is something that Congress
has proposed,” the president said last year. By some reports,
though, the budget cuts were brought to the table by White House
officials during the president’s first term in office. A bipartisan
commission chaired by former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyoming) and
former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles offered a
way to cut America’s ever-growing deficit. Under this proposal,
Congress and the president would have to both raise taxes and cut
spending across the board. Knowing that neither party was willing
to agree on these measures, lawmakers and Obama agreed on a law
that would trigger automatic cuts beginning March 1, 2013, unless a
deal could not otherwise be reached. Back then, it was seen as a
sword of Damocles that would prompt action from either party.

“Nobody who ‘agreed’ to sequestration actually wanted it to
happen,” reports Molly Ball of The Atlantic. “The
supercommittee was supposed to forge the deal that Obama and House
Speaker John Boehner could not in their July 2011 debt-ceiling
talks. It was this hypothetical future deficit reduction that got
Republicans, grudgingly, to agree to raise the debt limit,” she
says.

As time passed, though, the lawmakers that agreed to make the
sequester an option stopped searching for other solutions. A
failure to find a compromise between lawmakers on the Hill left the
spending cuts scheduled for March 1 inevitable, and as the clock
wound down on Friday the only option left was to slash the
budget.

“In the end, nobody could agree, and nobody took the deadline
very seriously anyway,” adds Ball.

While the sequester officially starts today following President
Obama’s signature on the directive, most government agencies won’t
feel the pinch until later in the year. Many departments have
already published their plans for handling the crisis, including
outlines of how spending will be conducted during the coming
months. But with funds drying up quickly and a further deal
reversing the sequestering uncertain, the impact of the cuts are
likely to only increase over time.